Garden Route

Last week we embarked on a 5 day trip. I’m going to tell you about the two nicest things: the Safari reserve and the bungee jump.

So the first day we were in the car for about 6 hours. We had a beautiful view but in the end everyone was just sleeping. People told us that we would stay the night in shaggy tents or dirty beds. This was exactly the opposite. There were about 35 individual cabins each looking over the reserve. Next to the cabins was the main building. This is where we had dinner, breakfast and a Jacuzzi. The safari itself was split into two parts. The first day was from 5 PM till 7 PM, and the second day in the morning. Lourents and I wanted to wake up early and see the sun rise. Unfortunately when we woke up at quarter to five it was too misty to see the sun rise. So we went back to sleep. The funny part was that we almost woke up too late the second time. Someone came to our cabin and asked us if we wanted to come to the morning safari. We quickly got up and went to the trucks. This morning safari was special for a two reasons: a veld-vuur and a special animal. Veld-vuur is the Afrikaans word for wildfire.  As we began to drive I spotted a cloud of smoke rising from behind the mountain. My guide told me what it was and told her that some poachers use this as a technique. If you have a large reserve, like this one, you have a lot of ground to cover so you can’t be everywhere at once. If poachers make a large fire in the corner of the reserve the ranger’s attention will go there. In the meanwhile the poachers can do their business. So, only one vehicle at a time was allowed to go to the fire. Once we were there it turned out to be a farmer that was burning tires in his back yard. The second special thing was a cheetah. There were two in total. We saw the female eating yesterday and the male was never seen from a car. Once it had been spotted by our guide a mile away we approached it. She told us that he was incredibly shy and had escaped into the reserve a few days before his release. For that reason he didn’t have a tracking collar. This means that if you wanted to find him you had to do it the old way.

The second amazing thing about the Garden route was the Bloukrans bridge bungee jump. It is the highest in the world. The bridge itself was 260 meters high. You jumped for 216 meters. To get under the bridge we had to go through a tunnel with a see through floor. It was hard to focus on the ground below you while you were walking forward, since you were moving a lot faster that the valley below you. Once you arrived at the middle of the bridge the atmosphere was amazing there are DJs and people are dancing all the time, unless they are jumping off the bridge of course. We got numbers written on our hands and we assumed that was the order of the jumpers. The annoying thing was it wasn’t. That meant that we would be dancing one time and that a guy would come up to us and say:

“You, come here. You’re the next jumper.”

It was a long wait for me as I was second to last to jump, but once I was called my blood started pumping. The scariest thing of the entire jump is when you are looking down. 260 below you there is a river flowing. You look at your toes that are over the edge. One gust of wind could knock off the bridge, but most importantly you want to jump… Before you’re done looking down and thinking of all the things that can go wrong they start to count: 5… 4… 3… 2… 1, BUNGEE. While they are counting they grab both your arms and stretch them horizontally. They start leaning you forward further over the edge and when they say bungee you jump. However once you jump your body is horizontal. This means that you are jumping away from the bridge. If you would jump up you risk having a whiplash effect. While you are falling down horizontally you have the same feeling as in a rollercoaster. The awesome feeling comes afterward. Once you are turned upside down the feeling in your stomach goes away and you feel as if you’re flying. It is one of the most relaxing moments I had in my life. You can see the surroundings move slower and slower and before you know it you are going up again. Once you’ve reached your highest point you start falling down. This is the most helpless I’ve ever felt. You start having the feeling in your stomach again, but for a shorter while. All of this happened in about ten seconds.

After you jumped you were hoisted up by a man and you have a little chat with each other until you reach the bridge again. It was my most memorable experience in South Africa yet. I certainly recommend everyone to do this, especially the ones who are afraid of heights.